Raf Simons: Force of Nature

Dior's creative director collaborates with the artist Robert Longo to turn fashion into art. Plus, see the fashion shoot.

Raf Simons is engaged yet remote, seductive in the manner of a mysterious boy glimpsed in the hall at school. His face is handsome, at odds with itself: martial black eyebrows over the undefended gaze of dark-blue eyes, the mouth curiously tight, the lower jaw thrust forward. He hates to be photographed and often takes his bows with his tongue thrust inside his lower lip. His dark hair is short, brushed forward. At 45 he has the lanky body of a tall teenager. He wears no watch and carries an ancient, un-smart cell phone, on which he claims to be able to text faster than anyone else. He dresses like a student—the collar of a red shirt visible at the crewneck of a dark sweater with elbow patches, dark pants. Lines of seditious nail heads along the sides of his black lace-ups are the only things that signal the impertinence of fashion. "Prada," he says. "Old."

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Hired in April 2012 to replace John Galliano at Dior, Simons has been ordained into the papal line of designers who've applied their talents at the house since Christian Dior's death, which goes Saint Laurent, Bohan, Ferré, Galliano. The cultured and thoughtful Simons brings the Antwerp spirit that revolutionized clothes in the 1990s to the high-profile big business of fashion. After expanding from menswear shows that exalted skinny teenage boys and radical culture (and had names like "Woe Unto Those Who Spit on the Fear Generation...the Wind Will Blow It Back" and the more succinct "Black Palms") to making beautiful clothes for women under the Jil Sander label in 2005, Simons is hardly a newcomer to the world of top-tier women's fashion. But Dior is Dior. And the circumstances of Simons's arrival at the house could not have been more dramatic. In February 2012, he was let go from Jil Sander just two days before a runway show that became his sudden farewell. The show ended with models, buyers, press, and Simons himself in tears. That July his first couture show for Dior—in rooms lined to the ceilings with more than a million flowers—was greeted with rapturous delight. He'd done it in seven weeks. Sidney Toledano, Dior's group managing director, declared, "He gave, he gave, he gave. He's aligning his vibration with the brand."

Of the day Dior hired him, Simons told France 24: "I walked out of the room and just started walking around Paris. I think I walked four kilometers." It was a kind of illuminated Werner Herzog moment. Back then his accent was thicker; the name Dior came out "Diorgh."

Simons's main language is Flemish. He was born in Belgium, in a place called Neerpelt, some 60 miles east of Antwerp. His father was a military night watchman; his mother cleaned houses. After attending a strict Catholic school, he went to college in the nearby city of Genk to study industrial and furniture design, with the goal of creating practical, socially responsible objects: "Furniture, cars. A bike for a handicapped child. A grab for a door," he explains. "Something to lift 24 beer bottles."

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We met at a grand restaurant in New York to get acquainted over food that takes longer to describe than to eat. Simons was staying at the Maritime Hotel, isolated on the roof in a suite with two fireplaces. "It's like being in an apartment. Last night I slept with the fires on and the windows open." I imagined him sleeping on the floor on a tarp.

Three words recur as Simons speaks: Challenge, not in the PC sense, as a handicap, but as an opportunity. Incubation is another, not in our sense of getting a cold but as the slow period when things develop—hidden and unconscious. (It's also the title of a song by Joy Division, one of the bands he loves.) And dialogue, the thing he craves. Asked why he switched from industrial design to fashion, Simons says, "As an industrial designer, you design the thing by yourself and then it goes away from you, whereas fashion is in constant relation to the body and to psychology. It makes it more complicated, and it makes it more challenging."

Today, while creating six collections a year for Dior, Simons continues his menswear in Antwerp. At Dior there are some 75 people in the couture atelier, 50 in the ready-to-wear. In Antwerp he works with just eight people. His life is divided into neatly alternating weeks. "Every weekend I'm on the highway to Antwerp. I need to be there, to have the calm. It's a whole different life: I jump on my bike, and it's so small, I can be anywhere in a minute. I like to be at home when there's free time because when you're at a big company, you're constantly surrounded by 30 people."

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Simons's work is in constant dialogue with contemporary art, an essential part of his life. He's a serious collector. "By nature, creative people like to evolve and explore," he says. "That is a need, a necessity." At the Frieze London art fair last fall, his intense focus wore out Dior's creative director of accessories, Camille Miceli. "We went in at 10 in the morning and stayed until 7 at night," she told me. "He stops at every booth, looks at everything; he goes so deeply into every detail. He's obsessed. And he has very good taste."

"Even when I was doing only the men's collections, I did things on the side," Simons explains. "I made videos, I taught at a university for five years in Vienna, I curated some big projects—an art show with Francesco Bonami for the Pitti Discovery Foundation in Florence called 'The Fourth Sex,' about the adolescent period when your sexuality is not yet defined."

An only child, Simons says he longed for siblings but had to settle for a pet, not a dog but a marmot—"bigger than a mouse and with longer hair." The rodent didn't last very long. "I spoiled it like hell," he says. "I gave it great salad. It loved salad. Every time the fridge would open, it would start to scream when it saw the salad. My dad said, 'Stop, get out with this thing.'"

His family lived in the country, next door to a farm where pigs were slaughtered once a year. "When I turned 18, it was time to run, run, run away from that and forget the whole thing," he says. "At that age you want the city, you want fashion, you want culture, you want art."

In Antwerp he wore Doc Martens and danced all night. It was the late '80s, and Belgium was becoming the center of new fashion, championed and nurtured by Linda Loppa, head of the fashion department at Antwerp's Royal Academy of Fine Arts. In 1991, designer Walter Van Beirendonck (for whom Simons worked as an intern) took him to a show in Paris by another Belgian, Martin Margiela, and Simons fell in love with fashion.

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But instead of leaping directly into fashion after graduation, Simons spent a few years in what he refers to as "incubation time," doing stints as a flea-market dealer and a designer of garden furniture. Then, in 1995, he got in touch with Loppa. "She is one of the most radical people I've ever met in my life," he says. "She lived in a 2,000-square-meter loft [21,500 square feet], with two Le Corbusier chairs. I wanted to impress her with the things I could do, to make her believe I could get in to her school. She said I should do it on my own and sent me to Daniele Ghiselli, a fashion sales agent for European distribution." The 35 pieces Simons made as a test were hung in a Milan showroom with clothes by Helmut Lang—and they all sold. "It was a very weird moment for me," he recalls. "I'm sitting there without money, without structure, all by myself."

He found a partner, and the businesspeople at Dries Van Noten helped with details. He lived with Veronique Branquinho, another talented Antwerp designer. (They split in 2000.) "Those early days, we weren't thinking about the fashion world," says Simons. "It was about going out, making clothes, telling stories, sharing aesthetics. There was no thinking process to it. It wasn't about business." He cast his shows with boys he found on the street. "Having a dialogue with models is very different from having a dialogue with men you cast from the street, who aren't going to tell you it's beautiful because they want the job again," he says. "You get very interesting feedback."

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Simons's first Paris show, held in 1996, when he was 27, was an immediate and influential success. Where he led, others followed. When he briefly dyed his hair jet black, everyone in fashion under 30 in Paris did the same. Boys starved to get into his clothes. At the same time, like Margiela, Simons refused to be photographed. He says, "It was such a niche thing—it wasn't supposed to set off the whole world."

When Jil Sander hired Simons as creative director in 2005, he had never designed a collection for women but had always longed to. "In fashion design you can divide people into two groups," he says by way of explanation. "You have people who come with an aesthetic that is there forever, even if it evolves. Then you have people I call jumpers. One season it can be this; the next season it's completely something else. I always knew I am more of a jumper."

It was at Jil Sander that Simons began to study the history of women's fashion and discovered a passion for Christian Dior, who "focused on the idea of beauty, femininity, nature. I grew up in that kind of environment," he explains. "Very much about nature and purity." His Dior clothes are reverential in their beauty yet thoroughly contemporary: He reincarnated Dior's definitive New Look Bar jacket as half of a shorts suit; he invoked evening-gown silhouettes but infused the potentially staid shapes with the thrill of the modern by abbreviating them at mid-thigh. He's fearless and willing to experiment within the context of respect for a legendary house.

But for Simons, the biggest change from his past engagements is the couture. "If at Jil Sander I had a desire to keep the shape up, I would grab two fabrics that would [do that] or use a chemically treated wool from Japan," he says. "But in Dior Haute Couture you can take the lightest-weight transparent silk and the atelier will bring the shape up. They don't do it technically; they do it with their hands." Enamored with the sense of freedom and possibility, Simons used his Fall 2013 couture collection to showcase a rule-breaking approach extending from curve-sleeved jackets to spiky shibori gowns and techno-houndstooth suits.

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When it came to the Fall 2013 ready-to-wear collection, his vision was to "use a visual language that clearly comes from human hands and link it to the memory of Dior." That meant deploying Andy Warhol's early fashion illustrations as decorative motifs on handbags, strapless dresses, and shifts. "He's seen as an artist that had a hard hand, silk screens and industrial boxes," says Simons, "but there's so much work that he did before that's very personal, very fragile, very feminine."

Sitting outside the restaurant after lunch, Simons marvels at the speed of things. "I'm very scared sometimes that fashion might attack its own magic by the amount of exposure," he says. "Is this normal, the speed of fashion? They say there are too many shows, but the nature of fashion is to have it exposed in that moment of ecstasy.

"In the '90s, when a designer showed something, you had the patience to wait until it was in the stores," he continues. "That had a lot of romance and mystique to it. If you want something and you have to wait for it, you enjoy it, probably, longer. If it's just thrown at you the moment you like it, how much are you going to still desire it?"

It's the same with love, Simons muses. "These days, people's perceptions of relationships are very different from 50 years ago. I come from a love nest. My parents—it's just such a love nest. I see a lot of the younger generation switching—whether it's love or a job—not having the patience. Lots of people want to change their reality when they don't see the reality as perfection."

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